Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (29 page)

‘Let's go,' said Jai, overcome with excitement.

‘I thought we decided to stay back this time?' It wasn't fear that drove Michael to say this. It was the fact that he didn't believe in violence, in the sudden escalation of forcefulness on both sides – the potential bloodshed and fighting amongst people who knew nothing except that they were meant to be angry.

He watched from his ducked-down position as three men upended a street sign, struggling to bring it down and use part of it as a weapon.

‘We didn't come all this way to turn back now,' his friend insisted and took off into the panicked crowd.

‘
Cooom-rade POWER! Cooom-rade POWER
!'

It was clear that Steven had been hoping for this exact outcome. His voice carried even without the microphone and his face contracted with determination as he caught retreating students and pulled them forward by their shirt tails or their elbows, encouraging them back – all the while, thrusting his arm repeatedly into the air. ‘No Justice! No peace! You cannot condemn a people unheard.'

When they reached Steven's side, he nodded at them with approval. ‘Good, you stayed.'

The T-shirts around their faces helped keep the severity of the tear gas at bay, and though it stung the back of Jai's throat, making him cough uncomfortably into the cotton, he shouted, ‘
Cooom-rade POWER
!'
and felt the strength of his voice lift even higher.

His gaze was cut through by the silver spiraling of a canister in the air, the high whistle of its trajectory filling his ears and, for a moment, the protest halted as he watched it come directly for Steven's head. Instinctively, Jai threw an arm around the man's waist and pulled him down so that the canister narrowly missed his cheek and slammed into Jai's upper arm. It ricocheted off him and threw itself further back into the crowd.

Jai brought his forehead to his knees, keeping his eyes shut tightly and his breath even tighter, but the canister never exploded.

‘Get up – let me help you.'

As Michael dragged him from the crowd, Jai looked back with sinking horror to see that some students were crowded around the canister.

‘Get away!' he shouted in Swahili. ‘It's going to explode.'

He wanted to move toward them but his muscles cramped up, closing inward.

Michael left him there, shoving his way through the crowd and toward the canister. When he reached it, he kicked it in a long arc and it landed on a patch of garden, bursting open in three separate clouds of poison.

‘You said we'd stay out of this one!' Michael said to his friend as he helped him across the road, away from the crowd. ‘What were you thinking? Look at your arm.' As he spoke, he searched around for shelter.

‘Over there.' Jai pointed to a small shop where an Indian man was leaning slightly out of the door.

As they approached, the sound of the riots fading into distant cries, Michael called out, ‘Please, can you help us?'

The man looked prepared to close them out but then he saw Jai cradling his bloodied left arm and he shoved them inside, shutting the door securely behind them.

‘You kids and your fighting,' he muttered, as the two boys fell to their knees at the entrance, coughing and gasping and dragging the T-shirts from their faces. The smoke had filled their throats and every breath was laborious, producing sticky and thick saliva. Their eyes were temporarily blinded by tears; it was as if they were viewing the shop from underwater – a lost city with grimacing masks – and Michael shut his eyes against it. He fought the clawing panic in his chest, pressing his palms to the ground, grateful for something steady and hard beneath him.

The man returned from the back of the shop with two pans of warm water and instructed the boys to wash their eyes with it, constantly returning to his window. As the stinging subsided and the world became solid once more, the shop owner said, ‘Let me bring my first aid kit – that looks quite deep,' then, shaking his head, ‘What were you thinking, taking your shirts off? Tomorrow, you'll see how much your skin will burn.'

Michael leaned his head in exhaustion against a wooden desk and closed his eyes.

‘Are you okay?'

Jai was like an excited boy, still in the grip of his adrenaline. ‘That was amazing!'

Michael didn't reply because on the contrary, he had felt like he had been amongst a pack of wild animals who had neither direction nor one defined purpose and, unlike Jai, he was certain that there were other, better ways of doing such things.

The man returned to fix Jai's arm and they stayed in the antique shop well into the evening, after all the students had been chased away and there was nothing but empty streets laden with rocks and the steel tinkles of tear-gas canisters rolling in the wind.

Esther had become an annoyance. More than that, she was his personal form of constant punishment. She had been more in love with David than Jeffery had imagined and the shock of his death had loosened something inside of her, leaving her constantly restless and muddled. Jeffery would often awake to noises in the kitchen or living room, the eerie scrape of chair legs as she dragged it to the open window, watching out over the road.

It was not long before this was accompanied by the clinking of a glass bottle as it rolled off the table top, empty. In all those times Jeffery had visited their house, Esther had refused to touch the alcohol her husband had so enjoyed. But now it was possible for her to go through half a bottle of whiskey during the day so that she would come to bed smelling sickly sweet and, on the worst evenings, like vomit.

One night, he heard her incoherent murmurings, louder than usual, and he crept down to see what she was doing, less out of worry than goaded by the desire to shut her up. The house creaked with the
swish swish
of passing cars, the drumming of the boys upstairs, which, when everything was closed, was like the vibrations of a lullaby. But now, they were hard and clear clashes of sound, filling him with sleepy irritation because she had opened all the windows.

Hidden within the shadows, Jeffery saw Esther stumble with the chair, catching herself at the doorway to the living room. She placed the seat beside the window and, grabbing the frame for support, hoisted herself up and steadied her shaking legs beneath her. Five months ago the slight piece of furniture would have held her weight easily, but now it strained and threatened to break beneath her body, which had ballooned with sorrow.

Her nightgown shifted about her body, revealing smooth, unbroken brown shadows and he noticed how, despite her skin having been forced to stretch over her growing size, it remained as taut and perfect as porcelain.

She placed one foot on the windowsill and edged slightly forward, gasping as the chair tilted beneath her, and brought her leg back down. She swallowed in gusts of cold air and clung to her stomach as the foot went back up, toes inching outward.

He should have let her do it. It had become impossible to forget the thing that he had done while she slept so close to him, seeking shelter in his warmth. Often, he would stare at Esther as she dreamed, her mouth slack and salivating, murmuring David's name.
Why, why, why have you left me here this way?
Every why was a fresh accusation, piling upon him like sin after sin until he was unable to breathe under the weight of her grief. He spent less time at home, some days with Marlyn, sometimes with other whores he found in bars, loitering on K-Street or even in the police station, when they came in to report assaults or robberies.

‘I was waiting for a taxi and this car came by and the driver threw eggs at me!' one girl complained, holding a dirty tissue to her bleeding forehead. ‘Then I dropped my purse in shock and they grabbed it faster than I could see.'

She couldn't have been more than seventeen. A poorly fitted halter top, cat-like red nails and lipstick that smudged higher than the natural curve of her lips. Jeffery scoffed. ‘We both know you weren't there waiting for a taxi. But no matter, I'll escort you home personally.' Instead, he had driven her to a motel and taken what he wanted, leaving her no money but with a promise not to arrest her.

He would come home after all of this, haggard and staggering under his many crimes, only to be met with the worst one of all.

Yet something compelled him forward that dark night, as if David was watching, the ringed scars around his neck puckered and ghastly, begging Jeffery to save his wife. And how was it possible to refuse a man after taking his life?

So he grabbed Esther by the collar of her gown and yanked so hard that she fell on top of him, knocking the chair with her heel.

They lay that way for several stunned moments, two fat bellies and a broken chair, with the shouts of
matatus
down below and the thrumming of instruments up above.

‘
Aki
,
that boy can't even sing!' he had shouted, shoving her off him. ‘How is a man supposed to get any sleep in this house?'

Esther stayed pressed to the floor, her skin dampened by drink and sweat, staining her pockmarks darker so that, in the moonlight, she looked truly horrendous.

‘Go back to bed,' he had commanded.

Several minutes later, she was crawling in beside him and he was disgusted to find her fingers searching between his thighs. He slapped her hand away. ‘Don't touch me.'

‘Please, Jeffery.'

With his back to her, she was slim and sweet again and he derived a cruel satisfaction from her attempt to apologize. He took her hand and returned it.

When she was finished, he asked, ‘Do you have any family here, Esther?'

‘They all live upcountry.'

‘Perhaps you should go stay with them for a while.'

He heard her fussing with the sheets, was horrified to discover that she was now touching herself. He had stolen away her husband and then failed to do what was required of one.

‘I want to stay here.' She sounded like a small child.

‘Then you can't keep acting this way.'

‘I have a cousin living in Nairobi – her name is Betty. I will ask her to visit for a while – it might help me get better.'

‘I'll go and stay with a friend while she's here,' he said, thinking of Marlyn and of how much he missed those dips and curves of her body, the inner softness of her thighs. A woman who knew how to take care of herself.

Esther didn't reply. He heard her panting, shifting beneath the sheets and it drove him from the bed, down into the living room, refusing to come back up until the next morning.

Two days later, in the lingering afternoon, when the sun tended toward evening, releasing its bright hold on the world, a small lizard climbed the water drain off the east side of the Kohlis' house. Occasionally, it paused to flick out its tongue, scales glowing green, yellow or purple depending on its position in the light.

The only sounds to be heard were the countless blue-jays, stirring up mini-tornadoes in the trees. Inside, infrequent footsteps could be heard in the kitchen as they moved from stove to sink – cooking, washing and drying all at once. Sometimes, Betty could be there until nine o'clock, depending on what time the Kohlis ate their dinner.

Upstairs, in the room at the head of the corridor, the curtains were drawn. Pooja appeared as nothing more than a slight bump under the covers and the only thing that gave her away was a leg jerking in sleep and dream stirrings.

Suddenly, she bolted upright, fighting against the bedsheets. It took her a few moments to reorganize the world and she clutched her pillow tightly.
It was only a nightmare.
She glanced at the telephone, wishing there was a way to contact him. She had to laugh at herself, for what would she say if she could?
Hello, son, are you alive?

She checked her watch. The darkness in the room made it difficult to tell what time of day it was and when she saw it was closing in on five o'clock, she sprung out of bed. ‘
Baap-re-baap!
What will happen to dinner?' Searching for her slippers she rushed downstairs, shouting as she went, ‘Betty! Betty, where are you?' and came skidding to a halt in the small kitchen, where she found her maid gone.

Just ten minutes before Pooja had woken up, a strange man had knocked on the Kohlis' gate. Betty had sprinted out to it, not bothering to wash away the soap suds on her hands, pulling it open before the noise could disturb Pooja.

She wished she had checked through the gap first, because the man standing at the low step didn't look like someone who might visit the Kohlis. He was breathing too heavily and spat out a thick, brown stream of tobacco, rubbing his tongue across his teeth.

‘
Ni nini?
' she demanded.

‘Betty?'

‘Who are you?'

‘My name is Jeffery.'

‘What do you want?' She had partially closed the gate so that half of her body was protected.

‘Do you know Esther Kipligat?' he asked.

She recognized the name from her mother's side of the family. ‘Small?' she couldn't help but ask, curious. ‘Short with
funny-funny
marks on her face?' she added, patting her cheeks.

‘Yes, that one.'

‘She's my cousin. Has something happened?' Immediately, she regretted admitting ties to this woman. If something had happened to Esther Kipligat, it would now be Betty's responsibility.

‘Nothing has happened,' the man grimaced. ‘Yet.' He stepped forward and took her hand before she could back away. ‘We just want you to visit, that's all.'

‘Who are you?' she asked again, this time more urgently.

‘Her husband.' The word stuck in his throat and he coughed it out. ‘She hasn't been feeling well – we've had much to deal with and I thought it might be good to have her family visit.'

Glancing back at the house, Betty saw Pooja's bedroom light flicker on. ‘I have work to do.'